Photo courtesy City of North Port.

The Argus Foundation last month wrote about the City of North Port increasing city fees dramatically and the lack of transparency as to how that occurred. Unfortunately, we are seeing a disturbing trend in artistically crafted language that seems to be unchecked by the City Commission in terms of accountability, the commission’s main responsibility in city government.

As a reminder, we detailed the inability to secure background on the proposed staff recommendation for North Port city fee increases.  The language as to the justification changed from “Analysis and comparison to local market fee rates” to what the City Manager called, “Unorganized Analysis” after constituents and groups attempted to secure the background and data without success. City Commissioners never publicly asked to clarify this, questioned it, or asked to make this transparent to the public.   

Now, however, we have a different topic and new artistically crafted language carefully used to cover the real situation. 

North Port needs a new and bigger police station. This has been a need but came to the forefront after the current station suffered damage from Hurricane Ian. The City Manager has proposed reallocation of Surtax IV dollars in order to do this.

Surtax IV is the extra penny consumers pay on the purchase of goods, which stays here in Sarasota County for building and paying for infrastructure like government buildings, roads, technology and other capital items. The money goes to the School Board, the county and all of the cities in the county. It is a referendum that comes around every 15 years.

As part of this process, each local government, including North Port, goes through a public process to put together a list of capital projects for the next 15 years that the governments each represent the money will be spent on. They submit those lists to the county and they are attached to the county ordinance that places the referendum on the ballot.

It was last passed in 2022 with the support of the Coalition of Business Associations members leading the way by paying for the campaign to ensure the community understood its importance. The community widely supported this effort and Sarasota County had the highest surtax passage rate in the state in 2022.

Now, the City Manager is proposing, less than two years later, reallocating significant surtax dollars from the publicly vetted project list to the police station. He is proposing to move the projects, Price Boulevard widening phases 2 and 3, and shifting the funding of those projects to the next surtax, Surtax V.

The problem is that there is no Surtax V, and therefore, there is no Surtax V project list. The Argus Foundation submitted a public records request to the City of North Port asking for the “Surtax V project list” and received the response, “The City of North Port has reviewed its files and has determined there are no responsive documents to your request.”      

When the City says they would be shifting projects to Surtax V, they are really saying they are UNFUNDING projects, namely two phases of the widening of Price Boulevard, the main east-west artery through the city, but don’t want to say that out loud. That sounds bad after they held out a list of infrastructure promises to voters that enticed them to tax themselves just months ago.

Now, let us be clear, this is a funding source issue, not an issue about supporting the police department or whether they need a new station. This is about the city’s transparency problem and not properly planning for its future. 

This is a wakeup call for City Commissioners. The city fee situation should have been a wakeup call on its own. But now, North Port is risking its infrastructure future, and, with that, the trust of voters for referendums in the future.      

Christine Robinson is executive director for The Argus Foundation.

Photo courtesy City of North Port.